The Federal Trade Commission reached a $100 million
multi-state settlement with Walmart over allegations the company deceived
customers and drivers who participated in its Spark Driver Program.
North Carolina was one of several states that sued
the company on behalf of delivery drivers and customers. As part of the
settlement, Walmart must pay its delivery drivers in North Carolina $2 million
for stealing their tips and other payments, Attorney General Jeff Jackson announced
Friday.
The retail giant will also pay another $10 million to be
refunded to delivery customers in North Carolina and nine other states. That’s
for the tips people thought they were paying individual drivers, but which
Walmart kept for itself.
“Walmart misled its drivers and its customers so that the
company could keep tips and other money that belonged to drivers,” Jackson
wrote in a news release. “I’m grateful for the federal government’s
partnership on this case to make Walmart pay back millions for North Carolina
drivers.”
Walmart has run the Spark Driver program since 2018.
Customers can use the Spark App to order products from
Walmart for home delivery, and people can sign up to be drivers on the app.
Drivers pick up products from Walmart stores and deliver them to customers, and
they use the app to view and select offers to complete deliveries for payment.
These offers include an estimate of how much the driver will earn from the
delivery, including the base amount Walmart will pay the driver and any pre-tip
the customer has selected to pay.
TikTok has agreed to settle the first in a series of closely-watched product liability cases, bowing out on the eve of a landmark trial that could upend how social media giants engage their youngest users and leave tech titans on the hook for billions in damages.
The settlement was reached as jury selection was set to begin in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Tuesday and comes a week after Snap reached a deal with the same plaintiff, a Chico, Calif., woman who said she became addicted to social media starting in elementary school.
“This settlement should come as no surprise because that damning evidence is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, an industry watchdog. “This was only the first case — there are hundreds of parents and school districts in the social media addiction trials that start today, and sadly, new families every day who are speaking out and bringing Big Tech to court for its deliberately harmful products.”
TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment about Monday’s settlement.
“The Parties are pleased to have been able to resolve this matter in an amicable manner,” Snap spokeswoman Monique Bellamy said of the settlement.
The remaining defendants, Instagram’s parent company Meta and Google’s YouTube, still face claims that their products are “defective” and designed to keep children hooked to apps its makers know are harmful.
Those same arguments are at the heart of at least 2,500 cases currently pending together in state and federal courts. The Los Angeles trial is among a handful of bellwethers meant to clarify the uncharted legal terrain.
Social media companies are protected by the 1st Amendment and by Section 230, a decades-old law that shields internet companies from liability for what users produce and share on their platforms.
Attorneys for the Chico plaintiff, referred to in court documents as K.G.M., say the apps were built and refined to snare youngsters and keep them on the platforms without regard for dangers the companies knew lurked there, including sexual predation, bullying and promotion of self-harm and even suicide.
As the claims against Meta and YouTube head to trial, jurors will be asked to weigh whether those dangers are incidental or inherent, and if social media companies can be held responsible for the harm families say flowed from their children’s feeds.
Scores of potential jurors filled the beige terrazzo hallway outside Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl’s courtroom downtown Tuesday morning, most passing the time on social apps on their phones. Some watched short-form videos while others thumbed through their feeds, pausing every so often to tap a like on a post.
Roughly 450 Angelenos will be vetted this week for spots on the jury. The trial is expected to last through March.
Instagram is 15 years old, YouTube almost 21. Finding Angelenos unfamiliar with either is likely impossible. The trial comes at a moment when public opinion around social media has soured, with a growing sentiment among parents, mental health professionals, lawmakers and even children themselves that the apps do more harm than good.
The judge told prospective jurors that lawyers on the case could not review their online profiles. “We know many of you use defendants’ social media and video-sharing platforms, and you’re not being asked to stop, but until you’re excused, you should not change how you use social media and you should not investigate features you don’t usually use,” Kuhl said in court.
Phones are now banned in California public school classrooms. Many private schools impose strict rules around when and how social media can be used.
In study after study, pluralities of young users — among them the youngest of “Anxious Generation” Zoomers and the oldest Gen Alpha’s iPad kids — now say they spend too much time on the apps. A disputed but growing body of research suggests some portion are addicted.
According to a study last spring by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, roughly half of teens say social media is bad for people their age, that it interferes with their sleep and that it hurts their productivity. Almost a quarter say it has brought down their grades. And 1 in 5 say it has hurt their mental health.
K.G.M., the first bellwether plaintiff, said she started watching YouTube at age 6, and was uploading content to the site by age 8.
Today, about 85% of children under 12 watch YouTube and half of those watch it daily, according to Pew.
At 9, according to K.G.M.’s lawsuit, she got her first iPhone and joined Instagram.
By the time she joined Snapchat at age 13, she was spending almost every waking hour scrolling, posting and agonizing over her engagement, despite bullying from peers, hate comments from strangers and sexually explicit overtures from adult men.
“When I was in middle school, I used to go and hide in the counselor’s office … just to go on my phone,” she said in a deposition last year.
Around that time, she said Instagram began serving her content about self-harm and restrictive eating.
“I believe that social media, her addiction to social media, has changed the way her brain works,” the plaintiff’s mother, Karen, said in a related filing. “She has no long-term memory. She can’t live without a phone. She is willing to go to battle if you were even to touch her phone.”
“There became a point where she was so addicted that I could not get the phone out of her hand,” she said.
K.G.M.’s sister was even more blunt.
“Whenever my mom would take her phone away … she would have a meltdown like someone had died,” the sister said. “She would have so many meltdowns anytime her phone was taken away, and it was because she wouldn’t be able to use Instagram.”
“I wish I never downloaded it,” the plaintiff later told her sister, according to the deposition. “I wish I never got it in the first place.”
Boosters of the litigation compare their quest to the fight against Big Tobacco and the opioid-maker Purdue.
“This is the beginning of the trial of our generation,” said Haworth, the tech industry watchdog.
But the gulf between public opinion and civil culpability is vast, attorneys for the platforms say. Social media addiction is not a formal clinical diagnosis, and proving that it exists, and that the companies bear responsibility for it, will be an uphill battle.
Lawyers for YouTube have sought to further complicate the picture by claiming their video-sharing site is not social media at all and cannot be lumped in with the likes of Instagram and TikTok.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs say such distinctions are ephemeral, pointing out that YouTube has by far the youngest group of users, many of whom say the platform was an on-ramp to the world of social media.
“I am equally shocked … by the internal documents that I have seen from all four of these defendants regarding their knowing decision to addict kids to a platform knowing it would be bad for them,” said attorney Matthew Bergman of the Social Media Victims Law Center. “To me they are all outrageous in their decision to elevate their profits over the safety of kids.”
Northwestern University will pay a $75 million fine to settle allegations of antisemitism from the Trump administration, restoring hundreds of millions of federal funding, officials announced Friday.
As part of the agreement, Northwestern also said it will continue following federal anti-discrimination laws, review its international admission policies and terminate an agreement reached with pro-Palestinian demonstrators last year.
The nearly $800 million in federal research funding was abruptly paused in April. The money is expected to be fully restored within 30 days, according to a statement from Northwestern University interim President Henry Bienen.
“This is not an agreement the University enters into lightly, but one that was made based on institutional values,” Bienen said. “As an imperative to the negotiation of this agreement, we had several hard red lines we refused to cross: We would not relinquish any control over whom we hire, whom we admit as students, what our faculty teach or how our faculty teach.”
Other universities have agreed to pay fines to restore federal funding, as President Donald Trump pressures institutions to align with his political priorities. He has particularly criticized elite universities as hubs of antisemitism and progressive culture.
Northwestern’s $75 million settlement, to be paid over three years, is the second-highest amount agreed to by a university. In August, Columbia University pledged to pay $200 million in a similar deal.
“Today’s settlement marks another victory in the Trump Administration’s fight to ensure that American educational institutions protect Jewish students and put merit first,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement. “Institutions that accept federal funds are obligated to follow civil rights law — we are grateful to Northwestern for negotiating this historic deal.”
The deal will allow Northwestern to draw on all research funding, including overdue payments, lift any stop-work orders on non-terminated grants and protect the university’s eligibility for future grants. It will also close all pending investigations from the Department of Education, Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services related to anti-discrimination laws and race-based admissions.
As part of the agreement, Northwestern also said it would commit to Title IX — which prohibits sex-based discrimination — by providing single-sex housing and locker room facilities for women upon request.
Additionally, it will review its international admissions and develop training “to socialize international students to the norms of a campus dedicated to inquiry and open debate,” Bienen said. To ensure compliance, Northwestern said it will establish a committee on its board of trustees dedicated to the agreement.
The paused funds had sent shockwaves through Northwestern’s research infrastructure beginning in April. As administrators scrambled to cover expenses, they resorted to a string of budget cuts — including hundreds of layoffs this summer.
The intense federal pressure led to the abrupt resignation of former President Michael Schill in September. Schill had faced an onslaught of conservative criticism since last year over his handling of Northwestern’s pro-Palestinian encampment and the resulting agreement he reached with demonstrators.
A new criminal investigation will determine whether fraudulent claimants — and those who enabled them — cashed in on LA County’s massive sex-abuse settlement
Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman has opened a criminal investigation into dozens, and possibly hundreds, of sex-abuse claims tied to the county’s historic $4.8 billion settlement. The inquiry targets individuals who allegedly filed bogus claims of childhood sexual abuse under a recent law that reopened the floodgates for litigation. NBC Los Angeles+1
The massive settlement, approved by the Board of Supervisors earlier this year, includes more than 11,000 participants who said they were abused in county-run facilities, including foster homes and juvenile probation centers. Hochman says some of these claims may have been fabricated entirely — “people that never suffered sexual abuse … looked at this potential settlement as a way to get some free money,” he told reporters. (NBC Los Angeles)
To encourage truth-tellers, the DA’s office is offering a form of partial immunity: individuals who voluntarily admit they filed false claims won’t have their own statements used against them in prosecution. But the amnesty does not extend to attorneys or medical professionals allegedly involved, according to DA statements. (Los Angeles Times)
The controversy has ignited outrage across local government. Critics say pay-to-file schemes, possibly involving law firms and claim recruiters, are exploiting both the system and real survivors. “They looked at this as an opportunity to personally profit … at the expense of real victims,” Hochman said.
The $4 billion payout is not the only settlement under scrutiny. The county recently approved another $828 million to resolve more claims, and Hochman’s office suggests the investigation could cover those as well.
For Hochman, the priority is clear: protect actual survivors and ensure the system isn’t abused. “False reporting of sexual abuse undermines our entire justice system … and is a grave disservice to actual victims,” he said.
As the DA’s probe unfolds, Los Angeles faces a reckoning not just over how to compensate past wrongs, but how to prevent future exploitation.
A wrongfully convicted man who spent more than 30 years behind bars will receive $19.1 million as part of a settlement with the city of Baldwin Park, officials said.
Daniel Saldana, 56, was convicted in connection to a 1989 drive-by shooting outside a Baldwin Park high school football game that left two students injured. But for years Saldana maintained he was innocent, insisting he wasn’t at the shooting.
Saldana was was freed from prison in 2023 after a judge declared him factually innocent and, on Friday, the Baldwin Park City Council agreed to pay $19.1 million to settle a wrongful conviction federal lawsuit.
Attorneys for Saldana argued in the lawsuit it was the “egregious misconduct” of a Baldwin Park detective that led to the wrongful conviction in 1990.
Saldana could not be reached for comment, but his attorneys released a statement blaming the wrongful conviction on a Baldwin Park detective.
“Mr. Saldana’s wrongful conviction resulted from the egregious misconduct of a Baldwin Park detective who systematically fabricated evidence and pressured witnesses throughout a fundamentally flawed investigation,” said Amelia Green, one of Saldana’s attorneys.
The case against Saldana began to unravel when one of the codefendants, Raul Vidal, told the state parole board in 2017 that Saldana was not present at the shooting.
A deputy district attorney had been present at Vidal’s parole hearing, but the testimony didn’t spark a review of the case at the time. It was not until 2023 that the state’s parole board turned over transcripts of the hearing to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit.
The district attorney’s office then moved to have Saldana’s conviction overturned, and a judge found him factually innocent in May 2023.
In February 2024, Saldana and his attorneys filed a suit against the city and former Baldwin Park Police Detective Michael Donovan, alleging the former detective coerced witnesses and falsified reports to get Saldana convicted.
Donovan allegedly pressured a teen witness to testify that Saldana was the second shooter in the incident, although the teen originally testified there had been only one shooter, according to the lawsuit.
In a statement, the city of Baldwin Park confirmed the settlement and said the incident did not involve any current city employees.
“The city sincerely hopes Mr. Saldana can now move forward in his new life,” the statement read.
The central jail on Front Street in downtown San Diego. (File photo by Chris Stone)
A $16 million settlement has been reached between San Diego County and the family of a 22-year-old man who died in San Diego Central Jail three years ago.
The family’s attorneys pointed to the county’s failure to preserve 55 hours of surveillance footage capturing the area outside William Hayden Schuck’s jail cell as a major factor in the case’s resolution.
The agreement, believed to be the largest wrongful death settlement in San Diego County history, resolves a lawsuit filed by the family of Schuck, who died in March 2022.
That happened to also be one month after the California State Auditor released a scathing report on the high rate of in-custody deaths at San Diego County jails. The audit examined 185 deaths within the San Diego County jail system for more than a decade through 2020, a rate that was among the highest in the state over that period.
With the new settlement, the county will have paid out about $30 million in two years, connected to just two deaths. Other lawsuits are pending.
Attorneys representing the Schuck family say numerous deficiencies highlighted in the state’s report, such as inadequate safety checks of jail cells and delays in providing medical treatment, played direct roles in Schuck’s death from dehydration and drug toxicity.
During a Wednesday news conference announcing the settlement, the attorneys also said the deletion of the video footage likely played a role in the county settling the case. They had argued in court filings that the footage could have confirmed whether or not jail staff conducted safety checks of Schuck’s cell during a period when his health rapidly declined.
Timothy Scott, one of those attorneys, said a San Diego federal judge sanctioned the county and ruled that if the case had gone to trial, jurors would be instructed that they could be allowed to assume whatever was contained in the footage would have reflected badly on the county.
“I do think that faced with that kind of jury instruction at trial, it did make the county more willing to settle,” Scott said.
A statement issued by the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office on Wednesday noted that Schuck died prior to Sheriff Kelly Martinez taking office in 2023. She was elected to her first full term in November 2022.
However, the department veteran had served as undersheriff, second in command at the office, since 2021.
In January 2022, weeks before the release of the audit, former Sheriff Bill Gore had announced that he would leave office early, on Feb. 3, 2022. The state released the jail audit that day.
“Since that time, significant improvements have been made to our jail system,” officials said in Wednesday’s statement. “Much more is needed, which will require significant investment from the county of San Diego.”
But the lengthy statement also pointed out that the settlement funds will come out of the Sheriff’s Office budget and the department “had no participation or input” on the county’s decision to settle.
Officials went on to cite results over the last year, during which San Diego County jails recorded the lowest number of in-custody deaths in more than a decade, with a 65% reduction in overdoses. There also were zero suicides in 2024, for the first time in more than 20 years.
“The Sheriff’s Office remains committed to learning from the past,” officials said near the conclusion of the statement, “while continuing forward progress and ensuring that past deficiencies are not repeated,”
That comes too late for Schuck, however, who was arrested on March 10, 2022 on suspicion of driving under the influence. He died less than a week later.
Attorneys say that upon his arrest, he displayed clear signs of intoxication and withdrawal that should have resulted in medical treatment, but he was instead placed in a cell without a mattress, where he was “forgotten” for days, according to attorney Michelle Angeles.
The day before his March 16 death, Angeles said he was found naked with sores on his body, while food and feces were strewn about his cell. During a court appearance that day, he was unable to even confirm his name, leading a judge to order that he be medically screened, according to the family’s lawsuit.
The Schucks’ attorneys say that medical screening never occurred.
The complaint states that despite the drugs found in his system after his death, there were no indications that he used drugs while in jail or had interactions with any other inmates prior to his death.
Along with the monetary component, Scott said the settlement includes an agreement to institute changes to the county’s training program for detention and correctional officers, though many of those proposed changes were being finalized.
The $16 million figure exceeds a $15 million settlement reached last year between the county and the family of Elisa Serna, who died in 2019 at the Las Colinas women’s jail in Santee.
L.A. County supervisors have unanimously approved an $828-million settlement for alleged victims of childhood sexual abuse, finalizing the deal while questions mount over the legitimacy of some claims in a separate multibillion-dollar payout that they agreed to this spring.
The settlement approved Tuesday brings the county’s spending on sex abuse litigation this year to nearly $5 billion, with the bulk of that total coming from a $4-billion deal made in April to resolve thousands of claims filed by people who said they were abused decades ago in county-run juvenile detention centers and foster homes.
The latest settlement involves similar claims brought by 414 clients of three law firms who opted to negotiate separately from the rest. The $4-billion settlement initially covered roughly 6,800 claims, but has ballooned to more than 11,000.
The larger settlement has come under scrutiny after The Times found nine people who said they were paid to sue. Four said they were told to fabricate the claims. All had lawsuits filed by Downtown LA Law Group, which represents more than 2,700 clients in the first settlement.
The firm has denied paying clients to sue and said it has “systems in place to help weed out false or exaggerated allegations.” The firm has asked the court to dismiss three claims on behalf of allegedly fraudulent plaintiffs this month.
Downtown LA Law Group will be required to detail any claims that came to it through recruiters, the county’s top attorney said Tuesday. The firm has denied any wrongdoing.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
The settlement approved Tuesday involves cases only from Arias Sanguinetti Wang & Team, Manly, Stewart & Finaldi, and Panish Shea Ravipudi and has no cases from DTLA. But the firm nevertheless took center stage Tuesday as the supervisors pressed their top attorney on how the lawsuits were vetted.
“What were we doing prior to this article?” said Supervisor Kathryn Barger, referencing The Times’ reporting from earlier this month.
The county was in a tough spot, county counsel Dawyn Harrison explained. Many plaintiff attorneys didn’t want the county interviewing their clients, she said. And a judge had temporarily paused the discovery process, providing the county little insight into the identities of the thousands of people suing.
Harrison said Tuesday that DTLA cases now will be required to go through a “completely new level of review” beyond the standard vetting that was already underway by retired Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Louis Meisinger. In addition to having a new retired Superior Court judge vet all their cases, DTLA must provide the county with information on plaintiffs acquired through “a recruiter or vendor,” she said.
“DTLA is required to identify every recruiter it used, a list of each plaintiff brought in per recruiter, information about any funds that changed hands, and a declaration under oath by each recruiter identifying what was done, what was said, and any monies paid,” Harrison said.
It’s an unusual request.
California law bans a practice known as capping, in which non-attorneys directly solicit or procure clients to sign up for lawsuits with a law firm.
DTLA has denied knowledge of any of its clients receiving payments to sue and said the firm wants “justice for real victims” of sexual abuse.
“If we ever became aware that anyone associated with us, in any capacity, did such a thing, we would end our relationship with them immediately,” the firm said.
The rush of lawsuits was kicked off by a now-controversial bill known as AB 218, which changed the statute of limitations for victims of sexual abuse and created a new window to sue. The county, which is responsible for the safety of children inside juvenile carceral facilities and foster care, has seen more than 12,000 claims and counting since the law took effect in 2020.
The allegations of fraud that now hover over these cases was the fault of “an unmanageable law,” not the county’s vetting process, Harrison said.
“AB 218 erased those guardrails and allowed decades-old claims that no one can meaningfully vet,” she said.
The county’s lawyers and politicians have become increasingly loud critics of the law, which they say has left them facing a deluge of decades-old claims with no records. Supervisor Hilda Solis said she felt the county had become the “guinea pig” for the bill.
Joe Nicchitta, the county’s acting chief executive officer, estimated that anywhere between $1 billion to $2 billion in county taxpayer money from the settlements will go to attorneys.
“The law had some very noble intentions but it has been … and I’m just going to say what I think, hijacked by the plaintiff’s bar,” he said. “They do all of the vetting, they do all of the intake, they advertise extensively. They’re incentivized to bring as many cases as possible.”
Nicchitta said he’d heard rumors that venture capitalists were poking around Sacramento to find out “whether or not we have enough cash to pay for another settlement, so that they can finance a law firm to bring another round of settlements against us.”
“It’s clear to me the system is ruptured,” he said.
Courtney Thom, who was the lead attorney on cases from Manly, Stewart & Finaldi, said she believed the county was blaming the new state law for the failures of its own lawyers.
“To blame AB 218 and say that’s what enabled the fraud is just a pathetic attempt to deflect responsibility,” Thom said. “Our firm has been saying for two years we’re concerned about fraud.”
Mike Arias, who represents clients in the latest settlement as a partner with Arias Sanguinetti Wang & Team, said the three firms involved stopped adding clients more than a year ago.
“That’s a big distinction,” Arias said. “We said, at the time, the number of plaintiffs would not change. Ethically, my view was that’s who we represent and who we’re going to negotiate for.”
Arias said the allocation for the second settlement will be done by retired Orange County Superior Court Judge Gail Andler, who specializes in overseeing sexual abuse litigation. Potential payouts will range between $750,000 and $3.25 million, he said.
Victims say the money represents a sliver of justice for the abuse they say they suffered while confined in county custody — little of which has been criminally prosecuted.
One man, who is part of the settlement and asked not to be identified, said he has no idea what happened to the probation official who he alleges raped him at around 16 while he was asleep in his cell at Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall, knocked out on sleep medication.
“I had no control in that place,” said the man, now 34. “My body hasn’t ever felt the same since.”
The county has launched an “AB 218 fraud hotline” where tipsters can report misconduct related to the flood of sex abuse claims.
(Rebecca Ellis / Los Angeles Times)
The county recently launched an “AB 218 fraud hotline” where tipsters can report misconduct related to the flood of claims. The county says it also plans to start a hotline for victims to safely report allegations of sex abuse in its facilities.
“It is illegal for anyone to file, pay for, or receive payments for making fake claims of childhood sexual abuse,” states a banner now running atop the county website with a hand doling out hundred-dollar bills.
The county also has launched a website that asks people to report if they were offered cash to sue, which law firms were involved, and whether they were coached, among other questions.
Supervisor Holly Mitchell, whose district includes the South Central social services office where seven people told The Times they were paid to sue, said she wanted to see the hotlines advertised as aggressively as the plaintiff attorneys advertised for their cases.
“You couldn’t turn on an urban radio station without hearing a commercial advertising these cases,” Mitchell said. “I certainly hope whatever we use, as we talk about our outreach, that we lean in as hard.”
Fesia Davenport, Los Angeles County’s chief executive officer, received a $2-million settlement this summer due to professional fallout from Measure G, a voter-approved ballot measure that will soon make her job obsolete, according to a letter she wrote to the county’s top lawyer.
Davenport wrote in the July 8 letter, which was released by the county counsel through a public record request Tuesday, that she had been seeking $2 million in damages for “reputational harm, embarrassment, and physical, emotional and mental distress caused by the Measure G.”
Under Measure G, which voters approved last November, the county chief executive, who manages the county government and oversees its budget, will be elected by voters instead of appointed by the board. The elected county executive will be in place by 2028.
“Measure G is an unprecedented event, and has had, and will continue to have, an unprecedented impact on my professional reputation, health, career, income, and retirement,” Davenport wrote to county counsel Dawyn Harrison. “My hope is that after setting aside the amount of my ask, that there can be a true focus on what the real issues are here – measure G has irrevocably changed my life, my professional career, economic outlook, and plans for the future.”
The existence of the $2-million settlement, finalized in mid-August, was first reported Tuesday by LAist. It was unclear then what the settlement was for.
Davenport, a longtime county employee, was appointed chief executive in 2021.
Under the terms of the settlement, Davenport cannot sue the county, including for “any claims arising out of the facts and circumstances surrounding the enactment of the ballot proposition known as ‘Measure G.’ ”
Davenport began a medical leave last week and told staff she expects to be back early next year. She did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the settlement.
Davenport’s Aug. 12 letter stated that other department heads had received significant payments upon departure. She noted the prior chief executive officer, Sachi Hamai, had received $1.5 million. The letter also makes an apparent reference to Mary Wickham and Rodrigo Castro-Silva, mentioning the former county attorneys by their last names.
Wickham received about $449,000 in severance pay and Castro-Silva received $213,000, according to records obtained by The Times.
“My circumstance is different in that I am not seeking to leave, and I have suffered damages, through no fault of my own,” she wrote.
Supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Janice Hahn first announced Measure G in July 2024, branding it as a long-overdue overhaul to the county’s sluggish bureaucracy. Under the charter amendment, the number of supervisors increased to nine and the county chief executive will now be elected.
On Aug. 12, 2024, a few weeks after the announcement, Davenport wrote a letter to Horvath saying the measure had impugned her “professional reputation” and would end her career at least two years earlier than she expected, according to another letter released Tuesday through a public records request.
“This has been a tough six weeks for me,” Davenport wrote in her letter. “It has created uncomfortable, awkward interactions between me and my CEO team (they are concerned), me and other departments heads (they are apologetic), and even County outsiders (they think I am being fired).”
Horvath’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The position of elected CEO was by far the most controversial part of Measure G. Supporters said that making the chief executive elected rather than appointed would bring more accountability to one of the county’s most powerful posts. Opponents warned it would consolidate too much power with one person and bring politics into a fundamentally bureaucratic position.
A judge temporarily blocked California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s attempt to take over Los Angeles County’s beleaguered juvenile halls on Friday, finding that despite evidence of a “systemic failure” to improve poor conditions, Bonta had not met the legal grounds necessary to strip away local control.
After years of scandals — including frequent drug overdoses and incidents of staff violence against youths — Bonta filed a motion in July to place the county’s juvenile halls in “receivership,” meaning a court-appointed monitor would manage the facilities, set their budgets and oversee the hiring and firing of staff. An ongoing staffing crisis previously led a state oversight body to deem two of L.A. County’s halls unfit to house children.
L.A. County entered into a settlement with the California Department of Justice in 2021 to mandate improvements, but oversight bodies and a Times investigation earlier this year found the Probation Department was falling far short of fixing many issues, as required by the agreement.
On Friday, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Peter A. Hernandez chastised Bonta for failing to clearly lay out tasks for the Probation Department to abide by in the 2021 settlement. Hernandez said the attorney general’s office’s filings failed to show that a state takeover would lead to “a transformation of the juvenile halls.”
The steps the Probation Department needs to take to meet the terms of the settlement have been articulated in court filings and reports published by the L.A. County Office of the Inspector General for several years. Hernandez was only assigned to oversee the settlement in recent months and spent much of Friday’s hearing complaining about a lack of “clarity” in the case.
Hernandez wrote that Bonta’s motion had set off alarm bells about the Probation Department’s management of the halls.
“Going forward, the court expects all parties to have an ‘all-hands’ mentality,” the judge wrote in a tentative ruling earlier this week, which he adopted Friday morning.
Hernandez said he would not rule out the possibility of a receivership in the future, but wanted more direct testimony from parties, including Probation Department Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa and the court-appointed monitor over the settlement, Michael Dempsey. A hearing was set for Oct. 24.
The attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“The Department remains fully committed to making the necessary changes to bring our juvenile institutions to where they need to be,” Vicky Waters, the Probation Department’s chief spokesperson, said in a statement. “However, to achieve that goal, we must have both the authority and support to remove barriers that hinder progress rather than perpetuate no-win situations.”
The California attorney general’s office began investigating L.A. County’s juvenile halls in 2018 and found probation officers were using pepper spray excessively, failing to provide proper educational and therapeutic programming and detaining youths in solitary confinement for far too long.
Bonta said in July that the county has failed to improve “75%” of what they were mandated to change in the 2021 settlement.
A 2022 Times investigation revealed a massive staffing shortage was leading to significant injuries for both youths and probation officers. By May of 2023, the California Board of State and Community Corrections ordered Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Sylmar shuttered due to unsafe conditions. That same month, an 18-year-old died of an overdose while in custody.
The county soon reopened Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey, but the facility quickly became the site of a riot, an escape attempt and more drug overdoses. Last year, the California attorney general’s office won indictments against 30 officers who either orchestrated or allowed youths to engage in “gladiator fights.” That investigation was sparked by video of officers allowing eight youths to pummel another teen inside Los Padrinos, which has also been deemed unfit to house youths by a state commission.
In court Friday, Laura Fair, an attorney from the attorney general’s office, said that while she understood Hernandez’s position, she expressed concern that teens are still in danger while in the Probation Department’s custody.
“The youth in the halls continue to be in grave danger and continue to suffer irreparable harm every day,” she said.
She declined to comment further outside the courtroom. Waters, the Probation Department’s spokesperson, said she was unaware of the situation Fair was describing but would look into it.
Despite the litany of fiascoes over the last few years, probation leaders still argued in court filings that Bonta had gone too far.
“The County remains open to exploring any path that will lead to better outcomes. But it strongly opposes the DOJ’s ill-conceived proposal, which will only harm the youth in the County’s care by sowing chaos and inconsistency,” county lawyers wrote in an opposition motion submitted last month. “The DOJ’s request is almost literally without precedent. No state judge in California history has ever placed a correctional institution into receivership.”
Under the leadership of Viera Rosa, who took office in 2023, the Probation Department has made improvements to its efforts to keep drugs out of the hall, rectify staffing issues and hold its own officers accountable for misconduct, the county argued.
The department has placed “airport-grade” body scanners and drug-sniffing dogs at the entrances to both Nidorf and Los Padrinos in order to stymie the influx of narcotics into the halls, according to Robert Dugdale, an attorney representing the county.
Dugdale also touted the department’s hiring of Robert Arcos, a former high-ranking member of the Los Angeles Police Department and L.A. County district attorney’s office, to oversee security in the facilities.
The motion claimed it was the Probation Department that first uncovered the evidence that led to the gladiator fight prosecutions. Bonta said in March that his office launched its investigation after it reviewed leaked footage of one of the incidents.
A bald eagle takes flight over the Susquehanna River near the Conowingo Dam, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2019, in Havre De Grace, Md. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)(AP/Julio Cortez)
A bald eagle takes flight over the Susquehanna River near the Conowingo Dam, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2019, in Havre De Grace, Md. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)(AP/Julio Cortez)
Maryland officials unveiled a $340 million settlement Thursday and issued a new water quality certification to the Conowingo Dam, clearing the way for dam owner Constellation Energy to seek a new 50-year federal license to operate the hydroelectric facility.
The deal also resolves years of contentious litigation over the nearly century-old dam, which has become an environmental flashpoint in recent years as its overwhelmed reservoir has allowed polluting sediment to overflow into the Susquehanna River.
Particularly during severe storms, water overflowing from the Conowingo reservoir carries nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus downstream, contributing to “dead zones” for underwater life in the Chesapeake Bay and hampering a struggling multistate effort to clean up the bay.
The settlement between Maryland, Constellation and a pair of clean water advocacy groups — Waterkeepers Chesapeake and the Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper — includes $87.6 million for pollution reduction measures, including planting of trees and underwater grasses. It also includes more than $60 million to improve fish passage over the dam, control invasive species and create a hatchery for freshwater mussels to be planted in the river; and another $77.8 million to clean up trash and debris rushing down the Susquehanna.
Constellation will also pay $18.7 million to explore, and possibly begin, dredging at the dam’s reservoir. But any dredging is still a long way off. All parties are waiting for a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study that will use computer modeling to assess the impacts of dredging on the reservoir and river downstream. Once that study is complete, likely in late 2026 or 2027, the Maryland Department of the Environment will decide how to use dredging payments that Constellation must make annually for 25 years.
Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown (D) speaks as Joseph Dominguez, CEO of Constellation Energy, looks on at the Conowingo Dam on Thursday. (Photo by Christine Condon/ Maryland Matters)
Even then, the agency could move toward getting a dredging permit, could call for more studies — including evaluating the potentially lucrative reuse of silt dredged from behind the dam — or could designate Constellation’s dredging payments to other environmental projects if the Corps study indicates dredging is inadvisable.
Robin Broder, executive director of Waterkeepers Chesapeake, said Thursday that she feels confident dredging will happen eventually.
Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper Ted Evgeniadis said his team believes dredging is an economic and viable option. Prior estimates, which found that dredging would cost Constellation “hundreds of millions of dollars every year for 50 years,” are no longer accurate, he said.
“Dredging is much different today than it was 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. There are new technologies today, whether it’s a hydraulic dredge or an ejection dredge,” Evgeniadis said. “All of these new things that have come up over the years are going to be looked at.”
A news conference Thursday at the foot of the dam — near where fishermen cast their lines and below scores of circling vultures and waterbirds — featured what one Constellation official said would usuallyt be considered “strange bedfellows”: Maryland state officials, leaders of environmental nonprofits and Constellation Energy CEO Joseph Dominguez.
Dominguez jokingly turned his pocket inside out Thursday, telling the crowd: “Yeah, this is costly for us. And yeah, I don’t have anything but lint left in my pockets on this one.”
“But I’m glad it’s resolved. I’m glad we can get up here and proudly say we’re doing all of this work,” said Dominguez, praising Gov. Wes Moore’s “steady hand” in the negotiations over the dam, which has 11 turbines, and can produce up to 572 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 165,000 homes.
The story goes back to 2018, when Maryland issued a water quality certification to the dam’s previous owner, Exelon. Constellation and its energy generation portfolio split from Exelon in 2022 to became a standalone business.
That certification would have required the company to mitigate the nutrient and sediment overflows, or make compensatory payments to the state that Exelon said could have totaled $172 million a year. That’s because the dam contributes an estimated 6 million pounds of nitrogen and 260,000 pounds of phosphorus to the bay each year, according to the Maryland Department of the Environment.
Exelon challenged Maryland’s certification in court, and eventually the two parties reached a closed-door deal in which Exelon accepted a number of environmental conditions and agreed to pay about $200 million over 5o years toward restoring the Susquehanna and easing fish passage over the dam. In turn, Maryland waived its authority to issue the water quality certification, to the ire of environmental groups.
That’s where a federal court said Maryland went wrong. In December 2022, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated the 50-year hydropower license issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission because it said Maryland could not waive its authority to issue the certification.
That sent Maryland back to the negotiating table — now with Constellation and the two environmental groups, who had also challenged the original water quality certification as not going far enough to protect the ecosystem. This was happening just as Moore was taking office.
“We inherited a project that was mired in lawsuits, had frustrations on all sides, where the future of the largest source of renewable energy in our state was in question, while environmental impacts were being unchecked,” Moore said. “I had people who said to me — they had a lot of words — but it all could get summed up in basically a few simple sentences: Stay away from the Conowingo Dam, because that problem is just too difficult to solve.”
Moore’s new environment secretary at the time, Serena McIlwain, having just arrived from California’s Department of the Environment, had to quickly get up to speed on the Conowingo Dam, along with the state’s other environmental challenges.
The Conowingo Dam will get a revised water quality certification for the hydroelectric dam, as part of a $340 million legal settlement. (Photo by Christine Condon/ Maryland Matters)
“I was told that, well, everything kind of went wrong with the negotiations before we started. One was, we didn’t have the right people at the table,” McIlwain said. “And I said to my team, make sure the right people — the waterkeepers — are at the table.”
Maryland learned “hard lessons” from the court’s rejection of the previous settlement, said Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown. This time, the state issued a revised version of the 2018 water quality certification, along with the settlement.
“The Department of the Environment will retain full power to enforce compliance with water quality standards — and that matters,” said Brown, who called the settlement a “historic victory” for Marylanders and the Chesapeake Bay.
Getting to the finish line was challenging. Brown said it took more than 30 mediation sessions. McIlwain said there were times when some of the parties were “ready to walk out the door.” Among the biggest sticking points was the dredging issue, said Adam Ortiz, a deputy secretary at the Maryland Department of the Environment.
“We could have given up months ago. We really could have,” McIlwain said. “But I knew I needed my job, and I said: ‘You guys are going to get back at that table, and I’ll bring more food. I don’t care. We’re going to get it done.’”
Constellation’s Dominguez bemoaned the long road the dam operator had to walk in order to get its critical new license from FERC.
“It shouldn’t have taken us 10 years to sort through all of the issues here, and that’s a bit disappointing,” he said. “But … the resolution to those permitting issues often requires people coming together that have different interests, that sometimes have conflicting interests, and bringing those folks together and making something good happen.”
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Judge William Alsup has rejected the record-breaking $1.5 billion settlement Anthropic has agreed to for a piracy lawsuit filed by writers. According to Bloomberg Law, the federal judge is concerned that the class lawyers struck a deal that will be forced “down the throat of authors.” Alsup reportedly felt misled by the deal and said it was “nowhere close to complete.” In his order, he said he was “disappointed that counsel have left important questions to be answered in the future,” including the list of works involved in the case, the list of authors, the process of notifying members of the class and the claim form class members can use to get their part of the settlement.
If you’ll recall, the plaintiffs sued Anthropic over the company’s use of pirated copies of their works to train its large language models. Around 500,000 authors are involved in the lawsuit, and they’re expected to receive $3,000 per work. “This landmark settlement far surpasses any other known copyright recovery,” one of the lawyers representing the authors said in a statement. However, Alsup had an “uneasy feeling about hangers on with all [that] money on the table.” He explained that class members “get the shaft” in a lot of class actions once the monetary settlement has been established and lawyers stopped caring.
Alsup told the lawyers that they must give the class members “very good notice” about the settlement and design a claim form that gives them the choice to opt in or out. They also have to ensure that Anthropic cannot be sued for the same issue in the future. The judge gave the lawyers until September 15 to submit a final list of works involved in the lawsuit. He also wrote in his order that the works list, class members list and the claim form all have to be examined and approved by the court by October 10 before he grants the settlement his preliminary approval.
Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors who say the company took pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot.Related video above: The risks to children under President Trump’s new AI policyThe landmark settlement, if approved by a judge as soon as Monday, could mark a turning point in legal battles between AI companies and the writers, visual artists and other creative professionals who accuse them of copyright infringement.The company has agreed to pay authors or publishers about $3,000 for each of an estimated 500,000 books covered by the settlement.”As best as we can tell, it’s the largest copyright recovery ever,” said Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors. “It is the first of its kind in the AI era.”A trio of authors — thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — sued last year and now represent a broader group of writers and publishers whose books Anthropic downloaded to train its chatbot Claude.A federal judge dealt the case a mixed ruling in June, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books wasn’t illegal but that Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites. If Anthropic had not settled, experts say losing the case after a scheduled December trial could have cost the San Francisco-based company even more money.”We were looking at a strong possibility of multiple billions of dollars, enough to potentially cripple or even put Anthropic out of business,” said William Long, a legal analyst for Wolters Kluwer.U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco has scheduled a Monday hearing to review the settlement terms.Anthropic said in a statement Friday that the settlement, if approved, “will resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims.””We remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems,” said Aparna Sridhar, the company’s deputy general counsel.As part of the settlement, the company has also agreed to destroy the original book files it downloaded.Books are known to be important sources of data — in essence, billions of words carefully strung together — that are needed to build the AI large language models behind chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude and its chief rival, OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Alsup’s June ruling found that Anthropic had downloaded more than 7 million digitized books that it “knew had been pirated.” It started with nearly 200,000 from an online library called Books3, assembled by AI researchers outside of OpenAI to match the vast collections on which ChatGPT was trained.Debut thriller novel “The Lost Night” by Bartz, a lead plaintiff in the case, was among those found in the dataset.Anthropic later took at least 5 million copies from the pirate website Library Genesis, or LibGen, and at least 2 million copies from the Pirate Library Mirror, Alsup wrote.The Authors Guild told its thousands of members last month that it expected “damages will be minimally $750 per work and could be much higher” if Anthropic was found at trial to have willfully infringed their copyrights. The settlement’s higher award — approximately $3,000 per work — likely reflects a smaller pool of affected books, after taking out duplicates and those without copyright. On Friday, Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, called the settlement “an excellent result for authors, publishers, and rightsholders generally, sending a strong message to the AI industry that there are serious consequences when they pirate authors’ works to train their AI, robbing those least able to afford it.” The Danish Rights Alliance, which successfully fought to take down one of those shadow libraries, said Friday that the settlement would be of little help to European writers and publishers whose works aren’t registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.”On the one hand, it’s comforting to see that compiling AI training datasets by downloading millions of books from known illegal file-sharing sites comes at a price,” said Thomas Heldrup, the group’s head of content protection and enforcement.On the other hand, Heldrup said it fits a tech industry playbook to grow a business first and later pay a relatively small fine, compared to the size of the business, for breaking the rules.”It is my understanding that these companies see a settlement like the Anthropic one as a price of conducting business in a fiercely competitive space,” Heldrup said.The privately held Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI leaders in 2021, earlier this week put its value at $183 billion after raising another $13 billion in investments.Anthropic also said it expects to make $5 billion in sales this year, but, like OpenAI and many other AI startups, it has never reported making a profit, relying instead on investors to back the high costs of developing AI technology for the expectation of future payoffs.The settlement could influence other disputes, including an ongoing lawsuit by authors and newspapers against OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft, and cases against Meta and Midjourney. And just as the Anthropic settlement terms were filed, another group of authors sued Apple on Friday in the same San Francisco federal court.”This indicates that maybe for other cases, it’s possible for creators and AI companies to reach settlements without having to essentially go for broke in court,” said Long, the legal analyst.The industry, including Anthropic, had largely praised Alsup’s June ruling because he found that training AI systems on copyrighted works so chatbots can produce their own passages of text qualified as “fair use” under U.S. copyright law because it was “quintessentially transformative.”Comparing the AI model to “any reader aspiring to be a writer,” Alsup wrote that Anthropic “trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different.”But documents disclosed in court showed Anthropic employees’ internal concerns about the legality of their use of pirate sites. The company later shifted its approach and hired Tom Turvey, the former Google executive in charge of Google Books, a searchable library of digitized books that successfully weathered years of copyright battles.With his help, Anthropic began buying books in bulk, tearing off the bindings and scanning each page before feeding the digitized versions into its AI model, according to court documents. That was legal but didn’t undo the earlier piracy, according to the judge.
NEW YORK —
Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors who say the company took pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot.
Related video above: The risks to children under President Trump’s new AI policy
The landmark settlement, if approved by a judge as soon as Monday, could mark a turning point in legal battles between AI companies and the writers, visual artists and other creative professionals who accuse them of copyright infringement.
The company has agreed to pay authors or publishers about $3,000 for each of an estimated 500,000 books covered by the settlement.
“As best as we can tell, it’s the largest copyright recovery ever,” said Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors. “It is the first of its kind in the AI era.”
A trio of authors — thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — sued last year and now represent a broader group of writers and publishers whose books Anthropic downloaded to train its chatbot Claude.
A federal judge dealt the case a mixed ruling in June, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books wasn’t illegal but that Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites.
If Anthropic had not settled, experts say losing the case after a scheduled December trial could have cost the San Francisco-based company even more money.
“We were looking at a strong possibility of multiple billions of dollars, enough to potentially cripple or even put Anthropic out of business,” said William Long, a legal analyst for Wolters Kluwer.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco has scheduled a Monday hearing to review the settlement terms.
Anthropic said in a statement Friday that the settlement, if approved, “will resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims.”
“We remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems,” said Aparna Sridhar, the company’s deputy general counsel.
As part of the settlement, the company has also agreed to destroy the original book files it downloaded.
Books are known to be important sources of data — in essence, billions of words carefully strung together — that are needed to build the AI large language models behind chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude and its chief rival, OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Alsup’s June ruling found that Anthropic had downloaded more than 7 million digitized books that it “knew had been pirated.” It started with nearly 200,000 from an online library called Books3, assembled by AI researchers outside of OpenAI to match the vast collections on which ChatGPT was trained.
Debut thriller novel “The Lost Night” by Bartz, a lead plaintiff in the case, was among those found in the dataset.
Anthropic later took at least 5 million copies from the pirate website Library Genesis, or LibGen, and at least 2 million copies from the Pirate Library Mirror, Alsup wrote.
The Authors Guild told its thousands of members last month that it expected “damages will be minimally $750 per work and could be much higher” if Anthropic was found at trial to have willfully infringed their copyrights. The settlement’s higher award — approximately $3,000 per work — likely reflects a smaller pool of affected books, after taking out duplicates and those without copyright.
On Friday, Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, called the settlement “an excellent result for authors, publishers, and rightsholders generally, sending a strong message to the AI industry that there are serious consequences when they pirate authors’ works to train their AI, robbing those least able to afford it.”
The Danish Rights Alliance, which successfully fought to take down one of those shadow libraries, said Friday that the settlement would be of little help to European writers and publishers whose works aren’t registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.
“On the one hand, it’s comforting to see that compiling AI training datasets by downloading millions of books from known illegal file-sharing sites comes at a price,” said Thomas Heldrup, the group’s head of content protection and enforcement.
On the other hand, Heldrup said it fits a tech industry playbook to grow a business first and later pay a relatively small fine, compared to the size of the business, for breaking the rules.
“It is my understanding that these companies see a settlement like the Anthropic one as a price of conducting business in a fiercely competitive space,” Heldrup said.
The privately held Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI leaders in 2021, earlier this week put its value at $183 billion after raising another $13 billion in investments.
Anthropic also said it expects to make $5 billion in sales this year, but, like OpenAI and many other AI startups, it has never reported making a profit, relying instead on investors to back the high costs of developing AI technology for the expectation of future payoffs.
The settlement could influence other disputes, including an ongoing lawsuit by authors and newspapers against OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft, and cases against Metaand Midjourney. And just as the Anthropic settlement terms were filed, another group of authors sued Apple on Friday in the same San Francisco federal court.
“This indicates that maybe for other cases, it’s possible for creators and AI companies to reach settlements without having to essentially go for broke in court,” said Long, the legal analyst.
The industry, including Anthropic, had largely praised Alsup’s June ruling because he found that training AI systems on copyrighted works so chatbots can produce their own passages of text qualified as “fair use” under U.S. copyright law because it was “quintessentially transformative.”
Comparing the AI model to “any reader aspiring to be a writer,” Alsup wrote that Anthropic “trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different.”
But documents disclosed in court showed Anthropic employees’ internal concerns about the legality of their use of pirate sites. The company later shifted its approach and hired Tom Turvey, the former Google executive in charge of Google Books, a searchable library of digitized books that successfully weathered years of copyright battles.
With his help, Anthropic began buying books in bulk, tearing off the bindings and scanning each page before feeding the digitized versions into its AI model, according to court documents. That was legal but didn’t undo the earlier piracy, according to the judge.
If you’ve lived in California at some point in the past seven years, you’ve got a shot at a very easy payday — and it’ll probably be enough cash to get a nice meal. Claims for another class-action privacy lawsuit are due Dec. 6.On Oct. 11, a San Francisco judge gave preliminary approval to a settlement that would see Thomson Reuters cough up $27.5 million, mostly to state residents. The deal caps off a legal battle that began in 2020: Two Alameda County activists sued the media giant over its Clear product, accusing the company of compiling millions of people’s personal data and putting it up for sale on the searchable database. “Thomson Reuters sells detailed dossiers on Californians across the state, people who have no idea their personal information is being appropriated, aggregated, and sold over the internet,” a complaint from 2022 said. The company markets its Clear product — not to be confused with the airport security tool — to companies, governments and law enforcement agencies. “Easily locate subjects,” one plan offers; another “displays a list of subjects’ relatives and associates.”In August, Thomson Reuters agreed to the plaintiffs’ settlement, which forced it to create the $27.5 million fund for Californians whose data it put up for sale. The company, which did not admit wrongdoing, also agreed to limit the data it keeps on state residents and to make that data easier to delete. So how do you get your cash? It took this reporter less than a minute to file a claim. The online portal simply requires your name, address and contact information — plus, you must swear you did indeed live in California during the claim period. It offers various payment methods and also has a page allowing Californians to opt out of the settlement’s terms. Californians have until Dec. 6 to file their claims, and a hearing to officially approve the settlement is scheduled for Feb. 13 — payouts won’t arrive before then. Only people whose information was put up for sale on Clear will receive money, per the settlement agreement, but plaintiff lawyer Andre Mura told SFGATE that everyone who meets the California residency requirement will fit that bill.Mura said the size of the payouts will depend on how many people make claims. His team estimates that between 400,000 and 1 million claims will be validated and that payouts will land approximately in the $19-$48 range. He noted that each claimant will receive the same amount.The math works that way because of the attorney’s fees; class counsel, on Friday, asked for $6.88 million plus almost $671,000 in reimbursements. The two lead plaintiffs, Cat Brooks and Rasheed Shabazz, are set to win $5,000 each, pending the judge’s approval.Thomson Reuters, which also owns and operates the Reuters news outlet, did not respond to SFGATE’s request for comment.See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletterDo you have photos or video of an incident? If so, upload them to KCRA.com/upload. Be sure to include your name and additional details so we can give you proper credit online and on TV.
SAN FRANCISCO —
If you’ve lived in California at some point in the past seven years, you’ve got a shot at a very easy payday — and it’ll probably be enough cash to get a nice meal. Claims for another class-action privacy lawsuit are due Dec. 6.
On Oct. 11, a San Francisco judge gave preliminary approval to a settlement that would see Thomson Reuters cough up $27.5 million, mostly to state residents. The deal caps off a legal battle that began in 2020: Two Alameda County activists sued the media giant over its Clear product, accusing the company of compiling millions of people’s personal data and putting it up for sale on the searchable database.
“Thomson Reuters sells detailed dossiers on Californians across the state, people who have no idea their personal information is being appropriated, aggregated, and sold over the internet,” a complaint from 2022 said. The company markets its Clear product — not to be confused with the airport security tool — to companies, governments and law enforcement agencies. “Easily locate subjects,” one plan offers; another “displays a list of subjects’ relatives and associates.”
In August, Thomson Reuters agreed to the plaintiffs’ settlement, which forced it to create the $27.5 million fund for Californians whose data it put up for sale. The company, which did not admit wrongdoing, also agreed to limit the data it keeps on state residents and to make that data easier to delete.
So how do you get your cash? It took this reporter less than a minute to file a claim. The online portal simply requires your name, address and contact information — plus, you must swear you did indeed live in California during the claim period. It offers various payment methods and also has a page allowing Californians to opt out of the settlement’s terms.
Californians have until Dec. 6 to file their claims, and a hearing to officially approve the settlement is scheduled for Feb. 13 — payouts won’t arrive before then. Only people whose information was put up for sale on Clear will receive money, per the settlement agreement, but plaintiff lawyer Andre Mura told SFGATE that everyone who meets the California residency requirement will fit that bill.
Mura said the size of the payouts will depend on how many people make claims. His team estimates that between 400,000 and 1 million claims will be validated and that payouts will land approximately in the $19-$48 range. He noted that each claimant will receive the same amount.
The math works that way because of the attorney’s fees; class counsel, on Friday, asked for $6.88 million plus almost $671,000 in reimbursements. The two lead plaintiffs, Cat Brooks and Rasheed Shabazz, are set to win $5,000 each, pending the judge’s approval.
Thomson Reuters, which also owns and operates the Reuters news outlet, did not respond to SFGATE’s request for comment.
Do you have photos or video of an incident? If so, upload them to KCRA.com/upload. Be sure to include your name and additional details so we can give you proper credit online and on TV.
Contamination of key Los Angeles waterways such as the Santa Monica Bay, Los Angeles Harbor and Echo Park Lake due to the spread of toxic chemicals is at the heart of a $35-million settlement between the L.A. City Council and agriculture giant Monsanto and two smaller companies.
The City Council on Tuesday announced the payout by the companies to settle a lawsuit filed in 2022 over damage from long-banned chemicals called PCBs, which have been linked to health problems including cancer.
The City Council approved the settlement at Tuesday afternoon’s meeting, voting 13 to 0 after a closed session. Councilmembers Imelda Padilla and Nithya Raman were absent.
A call to the office of City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto was not immediately answered, nor was a call to Monsanto’s representation.
In March 2022, then-City Atty. Mike Feuer sued Monsanto, which was swallowed by the German corporation Bayer in 2018, and smaller chemical companies Solutia Inc. and Pharmacia.
The complaint sought compensation for the cost of past cleanups — and for future abatement of — polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. The chemicals tainted and continue to pollute many Los Angeles waterways, including the Dominguez Channel, Ballona Creek, Marina del Rey and Machado Lake.
“The city has expended millions and millions of dollars so far and is going to continue to expend millions and millions of dollars to remediate this issue,” Feuer said at the time.
PCBs are human-made organic chemicals that have no known taste or smell and range in consistency from oils to waxes, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
They had several commercial uses, including in transformers and capacitors, oil used in motors and hydraulic systems, cable insulation, oil-based paint, caulking and plastics.
PCBs were produced and used domestically from roughly 1929 until they were banned in 1979, according to the EPA.
From the 1930s through 1977, Monsanto was the sole producer of PCBs in the United States, according to the National Library of Medicine.
Exposure to PCBs increases the chances of a person developing cancer while diminishing the effectiveness of the immune system and damaging reproductive organs and the nervous system, according to the EPA.
The lawsuit alleged that Monsanto knew that “its commercial PCB formulations were highly toxic and would inevitably produce precisely the contamination and human health risks that have occurred.” Instead of informing public officials, the company “misled the public, regulators, and its own customers about these key facts.”
The lawsuit alleged that, as early as 1937, Monsanto acknowledged internally that PCBs produced “systemic toxic effects upon prolonged exposure.”
Many of Los Angeles’ waterways had been impaired by PCB contamination, according to the lawsuit.
The city has said that it continues to shoulder the cost and responsibility of cleaning these locales along with monitoring and analyzing samples.
People face PCB exposure, according to the lawsuit, by eating contaminated food, breathing contaminated air, or drinking or swimming in contaminated water. Fish captured in contaminated waters and eaten also provide an avenue for PCB exposure.
The settlement avoids a court trial, which presented some risk to the city.
In May, however, an appeals court in Washington state overturned a $185-million verdict against Monsanto in a lawsuit brought by three teachers who claimed brain damage due to PCB leaks.
Invitation Homes, the nation’s largest single-family landlord, has agreed to pay $48 million to settle a handful of allegations, including that it illegally charged undisclosed junk fees, withheld tenant security deposits and engaged in unfair eviction practices.
The settlement was announced Tuesday by the Federal Trade Commission. Among the main allegations made by the FTC was Invitation Homes deceived tenants over the total cost of renting one of its homes.
The company, which owns or manages more than 100,000 homes nationwide, including more than 11,000 in California, did not include mandatory “junk” fees when advertising its rental rates, according to the FTC.
These fees — for things like smart home technology and utility management — at times raised the cost of rent by more than $1,700 a year and were only disclosed when consumers went to sign their lease, the FTC alleged.
By that time, the agency said consumers were in a bind because they had already paid a nonrefundable application fee of up to $55. They may have also forked over $500 to reserve a specific home, which they would only get back if they signed the lease.
Sometimes, consumers weren’t made aware of the junk fees until after they signed the lease and moved in, authorities said.
In addition to junk fees, the FTC alleged Invitation Homes rented out homes that were often in disrepair and systematically withheld security deposits for items that were not the tenant’s responsibility.
Invitation Homes also engaged in several unfair eviction practices, the agency said. Among them, the company told struggling tenants during the pandemic that their only options were to pay, move out or face eviction and failed to inform them of federal eviction protections available at the time, the FTC alleged.
“No American should pay more for rent or be kicked out of their home because of illegal tactics by corporate landlords,” Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina M. Khan said in a statement. “The FTC will continue to use all our tools to protect renters from unlawful business practices.”
In a news release, Invitation Homes said it made no admission of wrongdoing as part of the settlement and described its disclosures and practices as “industry leading.”
“Today’s agreement brings the FTC’s three-year investigation to a close and puts this matter behind the Company, which will, as always, move forward with its continuous efforts to better serve its customers and enhance its practices,” Invitation Homes said in a statement.
The company, which started buying thousands of homes in the wake of the Great Recession, has reached multiple settlements this year.
In July, it agreed to pay nearly $20 million to resolve allegations it made unpermitted renovations across its portfolio in California. In January, it agreed to pay several million to settle allegations it violated the state’s rent cap law.
Under the settlement announced Tuesday, which still must be approved by a judge, consumers would receive refunds and Invitation Homes will be required to include all mandatory monthly fees in its advertised rent.
The city of Los Angeles will pay nearly $40 million to settle three lawsuits alleging abuses by the LAPD, including a case brought by the family of a Trader Joe’s manager accidentally killed by a police officer who was firing at a fleeing suspect.
Melyda “Mely” Corado was fatally shot in 2018 at the Silver Lake store where she worked. Her father and brother sued the city and the officers involved in the shooting, alleging that they opened fire recklessly into the crowded store.
The $9.5 million settlement with the Corado family, which was previously negotiated but hadn’t been disclosed, was the smallest of three payouts the City Council approved on Friday.
The others were:
$17.7 million for the family of Kenneth French, a 32-year-old mentally disabled man fatally shot by an off-duty LAPD officer inside a Costco in Corona in June 2019.
$11.8 million for James Simpson, an elderly man who sustained a traumatic brain injury after being struck by a traffic signal pole toppled in an accident caused by an LAPD detective who ran a red light.
The council approved all three settlements unanimously.
In a statement released through their attorneys, Corado’s family members said they would “keep her memory alive always.”
“Nothing will bring Mely back to us and we are forever heartbroken by her violent death caused by those who are meant to protect and serve the community,” the statement read. “We hope this settlement sends a loud message to LAPD and all law enforcement agencies across the country that officers must account for their surroundings when firing their guns.”
The family’s lawyers called the settlement the largest pretrial payout ever in an LAPD shooting case.
“Mely’s death was entirely preventable if the officers had followed their training and accounted for their background while firing,” said attorney Neil Gehlawat. “Officers must look at the dangers posed to bystanders when using deadly force, and the officers here failed to do that.”
Corado was fatally shot on July 21, 2018, as two police officers pursued Gene Evin Atkins, suspected of shooting his grandmother and his girlfriend and then taking the younger woman hostage. Atkins led police on a lengthy pursuit in his grandmother’s car, during which he shot at officers, ran red lights and collided with multiple vehicles, prosecutors alleged.
The chase ended at the Trader Joe’s on Hyperion Avenue. Atkins stopped the car and ran toward the store, which was crowded with Saturday afternoon shoppers.
Atkins shot at the officers, who returned fire as he entered the store. One of the officer’s bullets struck Corado, killing her. Atkins was wounded in the arm, but he held shoppers and employees hostage inside the store for three hours before surrendering. His trial is pending.
The LAPD came under harsh criticism for shooting a bystander, which then-Chief Michel Moore described as “every officer’s worst nightmare.”
In the French case, the $17.7 million payout is roughly the same amount awarded by a federal jury in 2021 after Officer Salvador Sanchez was found to have used excessive and unreasonable force. Sanchez, who was later fired, was off-duty when he and French got into a confrontation in a line to sample sausages.
Sanchez’s attorney claimed during the federal trial that he was knocked to the ground during the encounter and believed that French was armed. Sanchez’s rounds killed French and wounded his mother and father.
The Police Commission found that Sanchez violated department policy. Sanchez also faced criminal manslaughter and assault charges, but the prosecution ended in a mistrial earlier this year. A call to the French family’s attorney went unreturned on Friday.
Simpson sued the city after sustaining numerous injuries when LAPD detective Alex Pozo ran a red light in Chino while driving a city-owned vehicle in August 2020. The driver of an SUV swerved to avoid colliding with Pozo and crashed into a traffic pole, which fell on top of Simpson, 70, as he walked on the sidewalk.
The city council voted not to approve a settlement for an LAPD sergeant who sued after being repeatedly disciplined over controversial posts on his personal Facebook and Instagram accounts. The sergeant, Joel Sydanmaa, accused the LAPD of singling him out for punishment for expressing political viewpoints they didn’t like.
“We rejected their suggestion, and we asked them to go to trial,” Councilmember Bob Blumenfield said.
Sydanmaa’s attorney, Caleb Mason, said he was “disappointed” that city officials apparently backtracked on what he described as a signed settlement agreement.
“My client waited three-and-a-half years for a trial date and then he agreed to vacate that trial date two weeks before his trial, based on the word of high level city attorney officials — he trusted them,” Mason said.
Friday’s payouts add to the more than $171 million in taxpayer money spent since 2019 to resolve legal claims accusing the LAPD of wrongful death, excessive force, negligence, discrimination and more, according to records from the L.A. City Tttorney’s office.
That figure could grow because the city is appealing several sizable payouts, including the $4 million that a jury awarded to then-Capt. Lillian Carranza, who sued over a nude photograph that was doctored to look like her and shared with coworkers.
Payments relating to a class action lawsuit filed in 2018 over Apple’s butterfly MacBook keyboards have reportedly begun to arrive. The settlement website now states that payments for approved claims will go out in August — and sure enough, 9to5Mac’s Michael Burkhardt reports that he received two settlement checks in the mail on Saturday. Just how much eligible MacBook owners will get varies depending on the extent of the repairs their devices needed. But for some, it could mean a check (or multiple) of up to $395.
After Apple introduced the butterfly keyboard in 2015, complaints arose over “sticky” and unresponsive keys, susceptibility to debris and other major issues. The company ultimately started phasing out the design in 2019. The lawsuit filed in 2018 accused Apple of knowing that its keyboards had problems and concealing this from consumers. While Apple denied the lawsuit’s allegations of defective keyboards and did not admit to any wrongdoing, it agreed to pay $50 million as part of a settlement.
Per the settlement website, people who got two or more topcase replacements within four years of purchasing one of the affected MacBooks are expected to get between $300-$395. MacBook owners who got just one topcase replacement could get up to $125. Claimants who only needed keycap replacements will get a maximum of $50. Of course, to receive a payment, you’d need to have filed any claims by the deadlines outlined in the settlement. And, when the settlement was first reached in 2022, Reuters reported that it will only apply to customers who bought the affected laptops in California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Washington. You can find the full details in the case’s FAQ.
If you bought a Disney Dream Key pass from August 25 to October 25, 2021, you could receive part of a $9.5 million settlement.
Disney has settled a class action lawsuit filed in November 2021 in California district court over how it marketed its $1,400 Dream Key pass, a program that allows customers to pay a flat rate to go to Disneyland and California Adventures theme parks whenever they want throughout the year.
The settlement website shows that payments to qualified class members were sent either by check or through a digital payment on June 14.
Unless a class member excludes themselves from the settlement payout, they give up any right to sue Disney over the same claims in the lawsuit.
Disneyland. Photo by Barry King/WireImage
According to the plaintiff, Jenale Nielsen, Disney advertised the Dream Key Pass as a way to enter Disneyland without any restrictions. When she bought the pass and tried to make a reservation, however, she found that Disney had blocked out many days, including all weekends in November 2021.
“Given that Disney had advertised and promised that there would be no ‘blockouts’ for Dream Key holders, Ms. Nielsen was surprised,” the filing stated.
Nielsen looked at Disney’s website and found that it still had passes available for sale on the days it had barred Dream Pass holders, so the blocks weren’t caused by tickets being sold out.
The filing called the Dream Key a “second class ticket” to Disney’s parks and said that Nielsen “was deceived by and relied upon” Disney’s “false and deceptive advertising.”
Locked Disneyland during the pandemic. Photo by Jeff Gritchen/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images
Disney denied all of Nielsen’s claims as well as any wrongdoing or liability.
Nielsen received $5,000 as part of the settlement and 100,000 others affected will receive around $67.41 from Disney.
For reference, a standard Disneyland theme park ticket starts at $96 to $194 per day.
Disney has now made changes to its Magic Key Pass advertising. The Dream Key is no longer available to purchase. In its place, the highest tier is now the Inspire Key, priced at $1,649 and labeled as subject to “applicable pass blockout dates.”
The Magic Key calendar at the time of writing had availability open for almost all days in July, August, and September for Inspire Key holders.
Elvis Presley’s granddaughter is suing an investment and lending company to halt a foreclosure sale of the late singer’s famed Graceland mansion.
Actress Riley Keough, who inherited the Memphis property after the death last year of her mother, Lisa Marie Presley, and a settlement with grandmother Priscilla Presley, obtained a temporary restraining order against a sale of Graceland by Naussany Investments & Private Lending LLC. The sale was initially scheduled for May 23, according to CNN.
Keough’s lawsuit, which was reviewed by The Times, claims that the company presented documents “purporting to show that Lisa Marie Presley had borrowed $3.8 million from Naussany Investments and gave a deed of trust encumbering Graceland as security.”
Keough denied that her mother had any involvement with Naussany Investments, claiming that the documents were “fraudulent” and possibly forged.
Florida notary Kimberly L. Philbrick, whose signature appears on the alleged agreement between Lisa Marie Presley and Naussany Investments, claimed in an affidavit that she did not notarize the documents.
“I have never met Lisa Marie Presley, nor have I ever notarized a document signed by Lisa Marie Presley,” Philbrick’s affidavit read. “I do not know why my signature appears on this document.”
“Lisa Marie Presley never borrowed money from Naussany Investments and never gave a deed of trust to Naussany Investments,” the lawsuit read.
Moreover, the lawsuit alleged that Naussany Investments was seemingly created “for the purpose of defrauding” and could be a “false entity.”
Naussany Investments did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.
Elvis Presley Enterprises, which manages the Presley estate, also called the claims fraudulent and told The Times in a statement that there is no foreclosure sale.
“Simply put, the counter lawsuit [that] has been filed is to stop the fraud,” the statement read.
Priscilla Presley, Elvis’ widow, also weighed in with an Instagram post on Sunday.
“It’s a scam!” read bright red letters over a photo of the Graceland mansion.
Keough was officially named the sole trustee of Lisa Marie’s estate and, by extension, Elvis’ estate in November after a judge approved a settlement between her and Priscilla, 78.
The settlement also provides that Priscilla will be buried at Graceland in the closest gravesite to the King of Rock ’n’ Roll and will maintain a role as special advisor in dealing with Elvis’ estate, for which she will be paid $100,000 a year.
The legal tensions arose after Priscilla contested Lisa Marie’s will following her death last January at age 54. Specifically, Priscilla questioned “the authenticity and validity” of a 2016 amendment that removed her and former business manager Barry Siegel as trustees in place of Lisa Marie’s eldest children, Keough and her brother, Benjamin Keough, who died in 2020 at 27.
Locked Disneyland during the pandemic. Photo by Jeff Gritchen/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images